[nickpsecurity]

"do they have the autonomy to avoid being similarly subverted in the future? Not rhetorical, I genuinely don't know how they are governed/if they can refuse the "help" of the 3 letter agencies."

It could happen to anyone if it's about receiving bad advice from an authority with a conflict of interest. That's why the solution is to either produce good advice for each of the things they're talking about or vet their advice to see if it contains any problems.

"what they lost in a backdoor, they gained in a chilling effect on the spread of good crypto practices by staining NIST's reputation."

I never thought about that. I doubt they intended that but it might be a real benefit for SIGINT side. That's interesting enough angle I'm going to bring it up to regulars on Schneier's blog who discussed the NIST stuff a lot.